That’s the question I answered for my series, even when I generally prefer my images to speak for themselves. Just to let you know that even when all of my images were shot wide open, that was by choice to illustrate these times where our vision of the future isn‘t edge-to-edge clear. My series will conclude in the weekend with my regular collage, which is the thing I‘ve actually been working on this month, not so much the singular images. They’re more like pieces of the big puzzle. If I had shot these images stand-alone, for a big part they would have looked very different indeed. Because I would have made other choices.
My dear chap, my comments are in no way a criticism of your images at whatever aperture they're shot at. You have artistic reasons for your choice and I look forward to seeing your collage. I've been wondering how you'll fit 29 images into a collage, I don't have long to wait to find out
By all means put my opinions, and after all they are only my opinions, down to my being an engineer by background with no artistic training whatsoever, perhaps there's a gap in my understanding with quite a few images that have been posted, if so I offer my apology's to all concerned.
Should my thoughts have stirred others up to rise up in defence of a minimalist aperture approach I am quite happy with that and have no intention of further pushing my opinion in response, after all we've recently seen what happens when people with strong opinions battle it out, no one is persuaded to alter their mind. Interestingly enough in going through my images it might be that I've used an aperture of f/4 more often than any other (my lens goes to f/2.8 at its widest) and my choices have ranged from f/4 to f/16.
When I started photography way back in the early 1970's the books all stated that lenses in those days were sharper 1 or 2 stops down from their maximum aperture, a lesson I still remember. Had I been around at the time I would have been a strong advocate of the f/64 club (think Ansel Adams) which is why I've found the images produced this time round by Hanneke to be my favourite, a fine example of composition at work. I started out as a user of medium format for black and white landscape images and that is still my first love although I also like the work of documentary photographers such as Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins, Margaret Bourke-White and W Eugene Smith.
Barrie
